Communicate and train to make more money

By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

Running a restaurant can often feel like you are in high school. Remember all the social drama that went along with being a teenager and trying to navigate friendships, along with trying to figure out what you want to do with your life?

In high school there is a lot of talking behind people’s backs, spreading rumors and trashing people for no reason. We learn all about reputation management in high school when we have to go around educating everyone about what is and isn’t true about us, repairing relationships that fall victim to false information and misunderstandings.

If only you’d had an opportunity to communicate truths and facts before rumors were started. Too bad high school didn’t come with daily pre-school addresses.

You know, like a pre-shift meeting in your restaurant?

So often I see restaurant employees — no matter their age, cultural background or education level — punch in at the clock and leave their logical brain at the door, just like in high school. They start chatter and rumors on partial information or just plain make things up. They talk behind fellow employees’ and managements’ backs.

Management often has to spend hours trying to dispel false information and rumors and repair employee relationships.

What’s silly about this is a lot of this wasted time could be prevented if management held a daily pre-shift meeting. One of the most basic ways to ensure positive communication is happening in your restaurant on a daily basis, to keep everyone informed, to reduce the rumor mill and to make sure everyone knows what you expect regarding performance is to conduct a daily pre-shift meeting.

Also similar to high school, many restaurant employees still don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. They are working in your restaurant only UNTIL they get their big break in acting, UNTIL they get their real estate license, UNTIL they get their teaching certificate, UNTIL they finish school… you get the picture. A large portion of restaurant teams have a short-term mentality, even if you and I both know most will probably never get to their next career choice. Many are career line employees, who have no drive or ambition to change where they are in life, dreaming of change rather than taking the appropriate actions to create change. This presents its own unique challenge to management, because they are trying to motivate a population that does not see the restaurant and its goals the same way management does.

This doesn’t make your employees bad people, nor does it make them losers. In fact, they are all winners who need direction from management, a work environment that is safe and positive and most importantly, they need you to clearly communicate what you need them to do, how you want it done, how well you want it done, how well they are doing and on everything that is going on in the restaurant appropriate to their level of responsibility.

And yes, you guessed it. All of this can be accomplished with a daily pre-shift!

A daily pre-shift meeting is your opportunity to communicate with your employees. Just take a look at some of the benefits:

• Creating a positive work environment – a pre-shift ensures that your management team MUST communicate every day with your staff. This teaches management the direct relationship between constant communication and happy employees. Employees in the know are less likely to make things up, spread rumors, be unhappy or present a behavior problem. And management that communicates leads.

• Happy customers – pre-shift meetings are your opportunity to train your employees every day, and we all know that training is imperative to your restaurant’s success. Management will train line employees on daily specials, how to up-sell at the table, product knowledge, events, coupons and promotions, events, etc. Training your employees on a daily basis ensures your guests have the best experience possible every time they dine with you.

• Make more money – when you train daily, when management creates a positive work environment, and your customers are happy… your sales increase and you make more money!

What should you cover in a daily pre-shift meeting?

Create shift meeting notes, which serve as your blueprint to a successful pre-shift meeting. Your notes are really an educational or communications tool. They communicate the following and more:

• Features of the day, including additional notes regarding the features
• Any promotions you have running
• Any contests or incentives you are running
• Policy changes or planned enforcement
• What the daily side work or sanitation duties are and who they will be assigned to
• Tips of the day, from up-selling and menu knowledge, service tips to cooking skills and people skills to self-help

Tips for using shift meeting notes

• Spice it up – no matter what you plan on communicating, you should make if fun and interesting.
• Remember it’s a legal document – you should keep all pre-shift meeting notes in a binder so that if and when you are in a labor board hearing you have proof that you had a policy in place.
• Represent you – make sure your managers know that this is not a place to doodle or place personal commentary. Rather this is a training document and must be treated as such.
• 15 minutes – conduct the pre-shift meeting 15 minutes before the shift starts. Require your staff to come dressed and ready. That does not mean wet hair, brush in hand and uniform slung over the arm.
• Treat the team as equals – all too often, management only runs a pre-shift meeting for the front-of-house employees. No matter your reasoning for not including those in the back of the house, you are setting yourself up for creating the “us-versus-them” mentality. You are basically telling your back-of-house employees they are not important. If you have to, run a second pre-shift in the kitchen. They need to be communicated with, too, you know.
• Post it – some restaurants have staggered starts for each department to save on labor costs. That means that there might not be a time for all the staff to huddle up for a meeting. The answer is to write up your notes and post them. Then require each employee to read the notes and initial that they have done so.
• Keep ‘em – keep your notes, especially after they have been posted and initialed. Remember, this could be used in a labor hearing or dispel the old, “I didn’t know” excuse.
• Repetition is a good thing – whenever you are introducing a new menu item, a new policy, etc., you will want to make sure it is covered every shift every day for at least a week. This will ensure that every employee has heard the message at least once if they are part-time and that you have been crystal clear with everyone else.

Embrace the benefits

If you like chaos in your operation and babysitting a group of high school students, no matter where they are in their life, don’t change a thing. But if you are like me, and are frustrated by the petty little games that poorly informed employees play, then start communicating right away and every day by conducting pre-shift meetings. Start organized by using the Shift Meeting Notes template.

Not only will your restaurant run better, you will increase your sales and make more money as a by-product. Don’t wait another minute. Log into the Member site, print off the Shift Meeting Notes form and start using it. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.

By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

Every quarter I travel to an Elite Member’s restaurant for our quarterly meeting. (As a group we rotate our meeting location to be able to tour a member’s restaurant(s).)

These Mastermind Meetings are incredible and do so much for everyone who attends. There are not many opportunities for restaurant owners to be in a room with 20 other positive minded restaurant owners who are willing to share their challenges, triumphs and opportunities with each other. I often feel blessed that they allow me to be in their group.

While I always come to these quarterly meetings with something I want to share, teach and enlighten members with, the majority of the meeting is members going around the table sharing a challenge or two they have been working on and want the group’s input. Time and time again, this exercise is worth its weight in gold.

During a recent meeting while we were going around the table I noticed that there was a theme emerging. Members were describing challenges of a young manager who was doing “fine,” sales volumes that were “OK,” references to managers and employees who were doing “good enough,” and then of course the fresh images of my walk-through the day before.

This got my juices flowing, and then I started in on one of my famous passionate David Scott Peters’ monologues delivered with all the excitement I could muster (sometimes you’d think I was delivering a soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet). Let me do my best to summarize the two main points I was making:

• As restaurant owners we need to “raise the bar.” When you walk through your restaurants, you need to have a customer’s eye. Everything we do needs to keep the customer in mind. How clean we keep our restaurant, the service we deliver, the product we deliver and ultimately remembering that we don’t just sell food and/or drink… we sell an experience.

When it comes to our management team, we need to set the bar high enough that they have to reach to ultimately achieve your customers’ expectations, your expectations of excellence and you and your investors’ financial expectations.

Your job is at every turn to take the time to communicate, correct and enlighten your management team of your high expectations so that they can succeed.

My mother, whom I consider one the greatest restaurant managers I have ever known and who is extremely detail oriented, worked for someone even more detail oriented. Nancy was the vice-president of food and beverage at the Show Boat Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., years ago. Nancy could make my experienced and seen-it-all-mother look like a rookie.

When Nancy saw that the buffet line had literally just ran out of spoons, she would ride my mother about it, explaining that spoons shouldn’t be allowed to run out. She would ride my mother until it was in everyone’s heads that as soon as that basket of spoons was half full, they were to fill it up, “no questions asked.” When that was fixed, Nancy would then find another point of customer contact that needed to be perfected and the process would begin again.

It may seem small, but Nancy, and ultimately my mother, did not accept anything other than excellence, and I suggest the same thing to my members and to you.

• There is no such thing as “good enough.” The ideal of good enough in the restaurant business is exactly why independent restaurants are taking such a beating. This phrase alone breeds mediocrity.

If you find yourself saying that your staff and management team are doing their jobs in a way that requires the use of the word “fine,” I would say that you are failing to execute the very basics as a restaurant operator. I’ll put money on the fact that you are leaving profits and sales on the table and probably losing money.

Look at it this way… who wants to spend thousands of marketing dollars to shoot from the rooftops to drive customers in by the bus load with this message: “Our service is OK. Our food is fine. Our cleanliness and ambiance is adequate. Come dine with us where your experience is forgettable.”

If you haven’t set the bar high enough, isn’t that what you are ultimately doing?

Taking action

The key to raising the bar is to take action. Taking action starts by clearly defining what excellence means to you and your operations. It means you have to put those expectations into action by communicating them on a daily basis and implementing systems to ensure that those expectations are met with or without you there.

Start the process

My goal in life is to help the independent restaurant operator not just survive, but to thrive, in the sea of chain restaurants out there. In order to do that, my job is to get you thinking of success in new terms, to motivate you to take action and ultimately to get you to raise that bar.

Do us both a favor, treat the words “Good Enough”, “Fine” and “OK” as if they were words you wouldn’t want your kids to use, even after they have heard them on the playground. They are unacceptable, BAD WORDS!

David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.

By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

In part 1 of How to Plan for the Holidays in the Restaurant Industry – Gearing Up, we talked about the importance of planning ahead and “gearing up” for your restaurant’s season. This week we will discuss the concept of “gearing down” after your business rush is complete and planning for the next seasonal change.

Gearing down
If you have a large swing in customers – due to seasonal changes – you understand there’s a significant thing that happens every year. That’s the time when your summer or winter visitors head home and the city feels like a ghost town. Translation… sales are going to drop!

This is the time you change your staffing levels by reducing hours and let your seasonal help go. With this adjustment, you are gearing down and accommodating for the decrease in sales dollars.

What about the future?
In some areas there is an obvious seasonal change. But it isn’t that easy for every restaurant owner. Sometimes it’s just a bump during the holidays or a small dip in the summer. But it affects your business. Are you ready to learn how to forecast sales effectively and identify your seasons?

Let me walk you through it step by step. In doing so I will break it up into three distinct sections: History, Plans for the New Year and Projecting Sales.

History
The first thing to do is gather as much pertinent data from your records as you can, especially from your last 12 months in operation. This data should include the following five reports:

1. Sales history by day for each month by category like food, liquor, merchandise, gaming or vending sales.
   2. Customer counts and average ticket.
   3. Sales log with: sales by period, total daily sales, customer counts or covers sold by meal period, weather, events, comments, item-by-item sales mix reports by sales category, catering events and sales

Plans for the new year
The second thing you must do is take the time to put into writing what you are going to do differently next year that will impact your business, whether positively or negatively. Then you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Will I be changing any menu items?
   2. Will I be raising my prices for food or liquor?
   3. Will I be implementing any new marketing campaigns?
   4. Will I be adding or removing any seating – new patio, etc.?
   5. What type of revenue do I think we will do in banquets and catering events?
   6. What outside factors am I expecting that can affect my sales – construction to the road, etc.?

Projecting Sales
Now finally you get to use the data you have collected on your past history and your future plans to project sales for next year. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Edit item-by-item sales mix reports with new prices and menu items for each month.
   2. See what the percentage increase is for each month.
   3. Add 100 points to percentage increase and multiply each day’s sales for each category.
   4. Using your past customer counts, recalculate what your average ticket is now with new prices and mix.
   5. SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) your estimated increase customer counts due to new marketing plans.
   6. Multiply additional customer counts by average ticket to project additional sales.
   7. Adjust numbers based on catering and events from historical date as well as projected data.
   8. Finally, put into writing the assumptions you used to create next year’s sales forecast so you will be able to make any needed adjustments or wholesale changes to your forecast as the year goes on.

This process not only requires quantitative historical data and projected data, it requires you use your intuitive or qualitative skills to interpret the numbers and create your projected figures.

Putting in the time and effort required to evaluate your sales forecasts and budget puts you in position to be a proactive restaurant owner and will ultimately ensure you make money, not waste it.

David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.

By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

Managing systems and developing people works

If you are a manager who isn’t great at finding each person’s exceptional skills and then developing those so that they’re better at the job, don’t worry. When you put the systems we teach into place, you will automatically be on your way to becoming a great manager.

This is because systems give you the ability to train employees at all levels in your restaurant to make sure your team knows what their job is, how to do their job and how well you want the job done.

When you are this specific, it makes it much easier to get your people to perform tasks and do their job the way you want it done — without conflict — when corrections are made. Systems allow you to stop managing people because you are actually managing the systems the employees execute on a daily basis. You simply see that things are being done, and whether they are being done correctly or not done at all.

Now implementing systems doesn’t make your people great. What it does is makes sure they are getting the job done. Systems allow you to virtually eliminate conflict and make it easier for you to manage your restaurant.

The development of your team starts when your employees know what their job is, how to do it and how well it should be done. This is because you aren’t fighting them to do what you need them to do. With systems in place, you can now focus on what makes your team members unique, identify their talents and instill a belief that their work is critical to the restaurant’s success.

In other words, implementing systems allows you to capitalize on the people part of the business.

This is exactly why I preach:

Managing People Doesn’t Work. Managing Systems and Developing People Does!

It’s dead on.

We see this play out on a weekly basis with our consulting clients. As we help them implement systems, the natural progression is that we teach management how to hold people accountable to the systems. Ultimately this means coaching them on how to get the most out of their team.

Notice the progression starts with systems. Developing their people comes second.

The reason for this is that without systems in place, most restaurants operate on some level of chaos. Order comes with systems that are used on a daily basis. And where there is order, there is time and opportunity to develop your people.

The secret is to stop managing people! Implement the systems that give you the ability to hold people accountable for doing their jobs to your standards, and you will be on your way to developing your team. Ultimately this is what takes your restaurant to the next level.

David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.

By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

Once you start using systems, your job becomes holding your managers accountable. As I’ve explained in previous posts, the secret to it all is checklists that keep your team on task and focused on what you expect from them. Daily paperwork is one set of checklists that are a “daily” necessity.

Here is an accountability checklist that covers daily paperwork.

□ End-of-Day Paperwork

• Was it completed before the last manager left the building?
• What is the over short?
• Check that cash deposit was used, not POS cash due.

□ Paid Out

• A paid out is cash used from a bar or cashier drawer to pay for a bill, an invoice or a store run.
• Entered to balance.
• Was the line item detail completed?
• Is there a receipt in the daily paperwork?

□ Manager Log

• Are the questions being answered?

□ Invoices

• Check that invoices are being entered as they come in.
• Check that invoice line item detail is being completed.
• Review physical invoices against the invoice summary report. Pick the correct date range, print it off and compare them to your vendor invoice summary reports.

□ Purchase Allotment System

• Check to see that the purchase allotment system is being used and followed.
• Double check purchase orders are within your purchasing guidelines.

□ Labor Systems

• Are master schedules in place and accurate?
• Has a labor allotment been run?
• Schedule is within budget guidelines using the reverse labor system?
• Is labor being tracked daily with the reverse labor system?

□ Food/Beverage Systems

• Are your products usable, have pars and locations set?
• Are recipe costing cardscompleted?
• Are you checking that orders are within purchase allotment guidelines and being placed on time (complete)?
• Has your inventory locations section been set to how the product appears on the shelves or alphabetical?
• Are inventories being taken every Sunday or at least the last day of the month?

Give this list to your managers. Your job is to hold your management team accountable and all you have to do is check their daily activities, holding them to this checklist.  If you simply ASSUME they are being done, you will not have control of your cash, profits or management. Follow this checklist to ensure you are doing your job!

For a checklist complete with descriptions and explanations of each category, visit this page for a Daily Paperwork Checklist.

By the way, Daily Paperwork is even easier to manage when you use our web-based restaurant management software – SMART Systems Pro (SSP). And with SSP, you can check daily paperwork anywhere you have Internet access, even from the beach.

David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.